There’s a story the old people tell about an angry, lonely mute. The Mute ripped his tongue out when he found he no longer had anything nice to say. He lamented that he had when he heard the dreadful yowling of his closest neighbor, the A*****e with a Guitar. At three am every evening, the A*****e’s music took shape, butchered Green Day tunes with skin like chicharón and half-mad R. Crumb faces that smashed through his window and poked at his eardrum with blunt pencils. One night, with duct tape and bits of glass from his oft shattered oft repaired windows, he made himself a sword and cut down the fiends where they stood. But, this was not enough for the Mute. He courageously wandered past his yard into the wasteland ruled by the A*****e with a Guitar.
He suffered thirst and hunger and constipation, muscles tore and knitted, erections came and went as he watched his wife who was ten years dead dancing, as ghosts were wont to do in the realm of the A*****e with a Guitar. “How dare you!” the mute would have screamed, had he not chosen to never scream again. Had he not chosen he would never scream again, he would have screamed that the tall found-object sculptures made from the bones of vanquished neighborhood pets were in poor taste, and it would have echoed defiantly were he half as loud as the A*****e with a Guitar.
He came at last after days of wandering the vastness of the A*****e’s yard to the beer bottle castle of the A*****e with a Guitar, guarded by zombie Van Halen solos who breathed poison gas that turned people’s hearts inside out. The mute was quick and angry, desperate, ruthless, taking the heads of solos as though they were only chords. He had in him the spirit of the knight errant which filled his body with strength when the last of it had abandoned him to sore into the stratosphere. Perhaps he, like his wife, was already dead and in his neighbor’s yard, he harrowed Hell.
The A*****e was clad in khakimail, forged by Abercrombie dwarves to preternatural perfection. He should not have feared the Mute’s sword, but did anyway since he swung his Fender as poorly as he played it., leaving himself wide open to a tsunami of cuts, to hatred that could cut an asteroid in twain. It wasn’t long before the A*****e was no more.
The A*****e’s ghost harem wept for him, among the soul of the Mute’s lost love.
“I’m alone now,” she said, “completely alone. But if you just say you want me, I can come home.”
Tongueless and sad, the Mute could do nothing but walk back home past his memories. While silence is golden, it doesn’t pay for anything.